Balancing the modern and the classic in Greenwich village

A designer working on his own home (and has there ever been one who didn't?) has only himself to keep him from doing the things he might be the first to talk his clients out of. What could possibly be more subjective than his own life, yet to provide a fit setting for it he has to impose on himself the same objectivity and discipline that he exercises on others.

Thad Hayes reconciled these opposing perspectives with his usual scrupulousness when it came to decorating his new apartment—a floor-through in a Georgian-style mansion in Greenwich Village. The handsomely proportioned, architecturally detailed, seamlessly flowing spaces all reflect his personal odyssey: from his rootedness in the Deep South, "so thick with great, old, moldering plantation houses," to his college days, when he embraced postwar American design to the degree that "whenever anyone mentioned raised-panel mahogany, I would just cringe." Over the long years of practicing, he confesses, he "mellowed out and learned how to blur the boundaries between modernism and classical traditional interiors."

The bedroom's late-1940s Danish mahogany desk struck Thad Hayes in its classic austerity as "something I might have designed myself."

The apartment, while clearly not reflecting what Hayes has called "the Lucite-and-Formica/steel-and-glass aesthetic of hard-core modernism," is modern nonetheless in its inspiration, form and composition. And "traditional" also resonates, if sometimes only as the absent presence. Altogether, the designer has wielded restraint so astutely that the rooms exude a sense of being complete without being full.

The central piece in the living room is a six-foot-square low table that is in fact quite high (he describes it as "tea-height"). He had it made from a single American elm, and chose black-painted steel I beams for its supports "as a nod to Mies van der Rohe's bronze ones on the façade of the Seagram Building." The table is galvanized by two suggestively shaped Chinese rocks on Ming mounts. "They were traditionally placed on scholars' desks as an incentive for contemplation," Hayes offers. "These two have very different personalities and energies—you can read whatever you want into them." Indeed: One appears plantlike; the other, horse-or dragonlike.

Ward Bennett I-beam side tables from the 1970s flank each end of an endless-seeming sofa, which Hayes upholstered in caramel leather and oatmeal wool. He had the wool channel- quilted to add rhythm and texture. "When I was growing up, car upholstery often had channel quilting, and that stayed with me as a modern look," he explains. The black-bordered sisal-like vinyl rug (of which there are two more in the apartment—one in the dining room and one in the master bedroom) not only feels good underfoot but gives off the meditative emanations of a tatami. The sense of peace in the room is enhanced by the presence of a Buddha head, crafted in the 1930s by French ceramics maker Raoul Lachenal; it's the sole object carried over from the designer's previous apartment.

For the ivory-colored wool sheer curtains, Hayes devised simple brass rods—"no fancy finials, no fluting"—as well as tiebacks in the form of big brass knobs that he sees as being "more like sculpture—let's say Brancusi." Between the two tall, transparent windows hangs one of the gilded, silvered and reverse-painted glass wall panels designed by the artist Jean Dupas for the grand salon of the Normandie. A ship's mast and a vestigial porthole can be discerned with some difficulty, but what the panel looks like out of context—and what attracted Hayes—is, simply, great abstract design. The lone painting in the room is an April Gornik that puts the designer in mind of the Long Island whaling village of Sag Harbor, where he used to own a house. "It's a winter scene, which is the other reason I love it, and not one of her more typical green landscapes," he observes.

"All the fabrics are tactile and luxurious, things you can cover up in, feel cozy and warm in. We re-created this sense of Old World luxury," says the designer.

Hayes modeled six chairs after a 1940s library chair that had trapped his attention in an upstate New York antiques store, and had them all re-covered in the same caramel leather as the sofa (there are two each in the living room, dining room and master bedroom). He also designed the living room's two faintly Asian mahogany cabinets. "They look so simple—and then you start to notice their raised paneling and refined proportions," he points out, adding that it was in deference to traditional design that he made these cabinets symmetrical. A little off to the side stands the prototype of a brass-based stacking side table with an upholstered wool top—part of a furniture line that Hayes is creating.

Because the dining room is an interior space with no natural light, the designer envisioned it as "a place of inward orientation." The 12-footlong rectangular table was fashioned from another single American elm, and the sideboard was executed in bronze so it would be "as solid as that table—made of a material that endures." One entire wall is given over to cabinets of Hayes's design, whose detailing poetically evokes Japanese folding screens. Another cabinet—a glass-fronted and carved rosewood English Aesthetic Movement piece that he purchased in London—is to Hayes the very incarnation of architecture ("It even has a balustrade"). For this dark-painted room, he selected a densely textured Richard Serra etching. "The image at its center is the shape of the sun—because it's black you could almost describe it as a reverse sun," he remarks. "And it speaks to the spherical mulberry-paper Noguchi lantern that I hung from the ceiling."

In the bedroom, to simplify things, he had the marble mantels painted the pale khaki of the walls. The late-1940s Danish mahogany desk struck Hayes in its classic austerity as "something I might have designed myself"; and the 1960s French lamp positively electrified him—its brass shade was so squarely architectural, its base of brass ferns so fantastical.

The Hayes-designed headboard is, naturally, the product of yet another single American elm. "The back and the I-beam bases don't touch, which makes for a purer architecture because you read the two planes separately," he insists. "That headboard is perfectly plain and blank—Minimalist even, in the sense of a Donald Judd sculpture—but at the same time it's finely grained. Or take that Eames plywood chair over in the corner, or those Edward Wormley lounge chairs: They may be modern, but they have traditional detailing. So here again, the distinction is a bit blurred between what's old and what's new."

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/2/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/2/2014). Architectural Digest may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Your California Privacy Rights (effective 1/2/2014). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.